Volume XIV, Issue Va
Beauty and Desecration
Curator 'Proves It's Ugly' by Way She Uses It
Landscape with Snow, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888
It all started with a very nice request from the White House. They asked the Guggenheim Museum in New York if they could have on loan Vincent Van Gogh’s “Landscape with Snow.” It was a request like the president’s house had made many times before and a request gladly honored by many a curator. Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, however, refused the offer—offering instead “America” by Maurizio Cattelan. Cattelan’s ‘art’ is a fully functional gold commode! Fox News reports: “Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, who turned down the White House request to borrow the Van Gogh painting – a standard request to borrow art that White Houses have made of museums for many years – made clear in a museum blog that she detests President Trump and wrote that “Trump is synonymous with golden toilets.”
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp stunned the art world by signing a urinal “R. Mutt” and entering it in an exhibition. He too did it as a protest. He was protesting what he considered the art world’s preoccupation with technique. It was meant as satire—it was taken as serious revolution. Roger Scruton, in the following presentation explains the need for beauty and the modern day preoccupation with ugliness that followed in the wake of Duchamp.
One comment I have is that Spector admits the gold toilet is awful by the mere act of offering it up in the manner that she does!